Intranet Journal
The online resource for intranet professionals
Building an Internal Blog with WordPress
P.G. Daly
3/10/2006
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Let's face it, blogging has definitely arrived in the mainstream and continues to seep within the walls of the enterprise. Early last year, I wrote "To Blog or Not to Blog" to raise the question of whether or not blogging has a place on the intranet. If you've been considering taking an internal blog for a spin, there is no time like the present to jump in and give it a try.
If you are looking to test drive the blog concept internally and want to try before you buy, there is no better choice than the WordPress platform. Now, before I get into the details of what WordPress is, how it works, and the factors that will help you determine if it is a good fit for your organization, let me make one caveat. If you are certain that you want to spread the gospel of blogging far and wide within your organization and build tight integration with content management and wiki solutions, you will probably want to investigate a solution that encompass a suite of tools such as iUpload.
A good conversation on this very topic of tools can be found in the article Forrester's corporate blogging solutions evaluation, Part 1 which links to a large volume of Forrester's research on these and related technologies.
Why WordPress?
That being said, here are some reasons why WordPress is a good choice for blogging within the enterprise.
What Is It?
WordPress is a blog publishing platform written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database. It is open source (thus, free of charge) and distributed under the General Public License. The most current version is 2.0 and thousands of downloads and plug-ins are available, including many themes (called "skins") that are essentially design templates for your blog. You can quickly activate or deactivate different themes to change your design on the fly. You can also develop your own, branded theme to match your corporate intranet using PHP, HTML, and CSS.
WordPress currently supports one blog per installation, but there is a multi-user version available (many of the benefits of free support and other goodies are not available with the multi-user version, however).
One blog per installation need not be a hindrance, however, since you can have more than one WordPress blog on the same server, even on the same database.
Setup and Installation
Setup for WordPress will be a snap for anyone already steeped in installing and maintaining Web technologies.
The minimum requirements for WordPress can be found on its Web site. Currently they are:
The WordPress Codex will walk you through all the steps of installation and troubleshooting. Basically it amounts to:
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